The present invention relates generally to electronic filing apparatuses, and more particularly to an electronic filing apparatus for filing documents employing an optically readable mark sheet.
Electronic filing apparatus have recently been considered; for filing documents produced daily in offices. Such an electronic filing apparatus comprises a scanner by which information of documents is optically read to be stored in a storage medium such as an optical disc. An electronic filing apparatus searches through registered information so as to retrieve required information from the registered information and then output the same to a printer at any time by predetermined output means.
The above described electronic filing apparatus including a scanner with an automatic paper feeding device is proposed. In this structure, the automatic paper feeding device feeds sequential data sheets to the scanner without moving the scanner to scan the data sheet. In this way, information is automatically read from the scanned data sheet.
In reading a data sheet, reading conditions are set in the electronic filing apparatus which reflect (1) the size of an original sheet or a data sheet, whether (2) the surface of the original is one side or both sides of paper, (3) the density of an image, (4) whether the image includes characters, photographs or the mixture of characters and photographs, etc. In reading different types of data sheets, reading conditions clearly vary for each data sheet and hence must be set many times. In the above described electronic filing apparatus, reading conditions are set by operation of a keyboard by an operator. Thus, the operator must continually operate of the keyboard while reading in the data sheets. Because the data sheet reading by the scanner is interrupted during the setting of reading conditions, the time required for filing is increased.
In addition, since the number of originals read typically is not monitored, plural sheets of originals are often erroneously fed at a time by the automatic paper feeding device. If plural sheets other than the first page are not read, the information on these sheets cannot later be detected by search;
Data used to search for data sheets must be registered for a set of data sheets along with data read from the data sheets. Filling data sheets also requires that data for searching for data sheet be set. Both of these processes are time consuming and prone to error.